THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Ladies and
gentlemen, let me begin by thanking all of you for all your work on
these projects, and thanking the members of Congress who are here.
Let me also begin with a story that's not in my notes but I think is
important to you to understand all this.

When Vice President Gore and I showed up here 20 months
ago we had talked about a lot of things. There were even cartoons
making fun of us for being policy wonks. I've got one in there in
the White House with everybody falling asleep while I talked to them
about more new ideas. (Laughter.) But one of the things that I
learned as a governor, even though we had kept our state and local
tax burden when I was governor in the bottom two or three in the
country every year, I still found that there was massive frustration
among taxpayers and among public employees with the way our
government worked, which was much smaller than almost any other state
government and, obviously, much smaller than the national government.
And we began this process of trying to reinvent our efforts there.

I thought that something like this on the national scale
was much more necessary if we were ever to make public employment
rewarding, if we were ever to reduce defense and maintain our
national strength and national security, if we were ever to regain
the confidence and trust of the American taxpayers. And when I
talked to the Vice President about it, he thought so, too.

I said, you know, the problem with this sort of deal is,
everybody is for it. It's a 100 to nothing deal, but nobody wants to
take responsibility for it because it is a real pain to get it done.
He was willing to take responsibility for getting it done, and the
American people owe him a great deal of gratitude for the work that
he has done. (Applause.)

I kind of hate to sign this bill today. What will Jay
Leno do, there will be no more $500 hammers, no more $600 toilet
seats, no more $10 ash trays. Al Gore will never get on David
Letterman again. (Laughter.) It's sort of a sad moment --(laughter)
-- the passing of government purchasing as the butt of all of the
jokes on the evening shows. But it is a very important moment for
the American people who are out there working hard who need to keep
as much of their money as they can, and if they give us any of it
they're entitled to know that we're spending it properly.

This government cannot ignore problems with our
operations. We have tried to get those problems into the open and to
deal with them and, in the process, to make it part of our ongoing
effort to have the actions of our national government mirror what
should be happening in all of our society -- decentralizing,
empowering people, relying more on people who are closest to the
action.

We've done a lot of other things like that. I signed a
bank reform bill the other day which will remove a billion dollars in
regulatory compliance; the trucking deregulation bill, estimated to
save $8 billion in compliance with federal regulations. We built a
new highway in California after the earthquake in less than half the
time we were told it could be built because we just changed the rules
and the incentive structure there.

The SBA now can give you a three-page form -- or a onepage
form for a loan instead of one that's 100 pages long and you can
get an answer in three days. This is all part of that. We've given
17 states -- 17 states in two years -- more than in the previous 12
years -- permission to design their own welfare reform systems to
move people from welfare to work.

So this procurement reform legislation we are signing
today is a way to build the confidence of the American people in
government, but also empower the people who work for the government
to make the most of their jobs and make the most of taxpayers'
dollars.

This is the kind of thing I'm convinced that we'll be
called upon to do more and more -- not to do things for people, but
to empower people to do things for themselves, both within and beyond
the government. If you think about it, that's what the Family Leave
law is all about. You've got to be a parent; you've got to be a
worker, you might as well be good at both. That's what the Family
Leave law is about.

That's what the college loan law is about, where the
Secretary of Education and Deputy Secretary of Education and others
designed a way that actually costs the taxpayers less to figure out
how to give people college loans at lower interest rates and longer
repayment terms -- 20 million Americans already eligible to refinance
their loans. We're not giving anybody an education, we're just
making it possible for them to get it, and make a contribution to our
country.

And that's really what this whole reinventing government
is all about. It's a big challenge. One of the reasons it's a big
challenge is that we've committed to reduce the size of this
government by 272,000 -- to its smallest size since the Kennedy
administration -- within a six-year period. That means that we have
to reform all of our other systems. If we don't reform the
procurement system, we'll have too many people working in procurement
to ever make that reduction. If we don't redefine the functions of
the government, we'll never get there.

That's why I'm so proud -- and I want to say a little
more in a minute -- but I am so proud of the work that Secretary Espy
has done at the Agriculture Department, where they have -- in this
Agriculture Department reform legislation that I just signed they've
reduced the number of their agencies by a third within the
Agriculture Department; they've reduced their employment by 7,500;
they've done a whole lot of other things that are profoundly
important.

All of this will enable us not only to downsize the
government, to do it without reducing the services we're giving to
the American people.

One of the things that I found kind of nice is -- you
know, it's hard for a fellow like me to ever find anything in print I
want to hold up anymore -- (laughter) -- but the Financial World,
which is not the house organ of this administration -- (laughter) --
has written a letter to me in their present issue. And it says, with
regard to running the government, "We think you're making real
progress. We've taken a close look at 10 of your major Executive
Branch departments and agencies to see how well they're managed. And
we can report that most of them have improved under your leadership."
Well, I appreciate that, but you guys get the credit, and I thank you
for doing it.

I know that a lot of Americans have heard all these
stories, but in addition to the ones that the Vice President told on
the Letterman show, I think it's important to realize that there were
real consequences to some of these problems that went beyond money.

A lot of you remember the story that Lieutenant Colonel
Brad Orton told us from Operation Desert Storm, when the Air Force
tried to buy 6,000 of these high-tech, two-way radios from Motorola
that were on the commercial market. They couldn't do it, and we were
embarrassed. We had to go to the Japanese and ask them to buy the
radios because we didn't have time to go through our procurement
processes when we were out there trying to fight a war and stop a
tyrant. You know, it's not as funny as the stories you hear, but it
is terribly important.

Well, a highly-competitive company like Motorola,
frankly, didn't have time to spend all the money and effort it would
take to comply with the inane regulations that kept government
employees from buying these. One of the things that I'm really
pleased about is that, Senator Glenn, we now have, and Congressman
Conyers, a letter in our file to me from the president of Motorola
saying that you guys did a good job on this procurement reform, and
we can now buy all of these that we need. (Laughter and applause.)

You know, one other thing I would like to say is that
very often little things have big consequences. I was pleased to see
that the Vice President introduced Michelle Cradduck -- and you see
she got a good little article in the local paper here today. We
would like to have your advice about how to get this kind of press on
a more regular basis. (Laughter.) Now, that would be a real re
invention of government. (Laughter.)

But you think about this. This law cuts red tape for
purchases under $100,000, but it lets, maybe most important of all,
front-line managers decide on purchases of less than $2,500. They
can shop for the best deal without being bogged down in any
bureaucracy. This will save -- this is amazing -- this will save, we
estimate, $50 on every single purchase of items under $2,500. That's
how much money we have been paying to comply with our own rules and
regulations. Fifty dollars, you think about it; you add that up.
That's a lot of children in Head Start. That's a lot of high school
graduates going into apprenticeship programs. That's a lot of middle
class kids getting college loans. That's a lot of money that's just
been flushed away because we didn't change with the times.

Gone are the days when a $4 stapler will require $50
worth of paperwork -- never again, thanks to people like Michelle
Cradduck. We thank you very much. (Applause.)

Today I am signing an executive order that will go a
little beyond the law. It will actually give people who use these
products the authority to make small purchases, so the managers don't
have to do it either.

These reforms, as I said, by illustrating this, will
also strengthen our national security. Under the old system, defense
contractors were virtually forced to develop practices and products
unique to the military. The procurement process itself defied the
development of modern technology in requiring the American industry
to divide into defense and nondefense sectors. It meant our military
paid higher prices, often couldn't get state-of-the-art technologies,
and it meant, also, that we were dividing American industry at a time
when emerging technologies were unifying processes across the lines
of defense and nondefense economic sectors.

With these reforms and the ones that Secretary Perry
announced last June, our men and women in uniform will have the best
equipment in the world, they will be able to operate in this postCold
War world which, as we all know, is still a dangerous place, the
private sectors will be able to provide the equipment they need, and
they will be able to do it in a way that strengthens the commercial
sector as well as the defense sector instead of dividing them both
and weakening them both.

This will help us to compete and win in the global
marketplace as we build our national security, not forcing company
after company after company to choose between one or the other path.
It is a very important, but little noticed consequence of this
reform.

Let me also say that this law also builds on our
commitment to small businesses. It allows small businesses to learn
more about and bid on government contracts through electronic
information that works; they can reach to their own computers. It
continues to increase purchases for minority-owned businesses, it
sets a goal that at least five percent of the purchases will come
from businesses owned by women.

As I said earlier in reference to the Agriculture
Department bill, there are a lot of other things which should
reinforce what we're doing today. I signed a bill which helps HUD to
improve the management of apartment buildings and helps the
Department of Energy's laboratories to develop peacetime
technologies. The Agriculture Department bill, as I said earlier,
closes 1,200 unneeded offices, fights fraud and abuse in the crop
insurance program, cuts the number of divisions in the department by
a third, reduces employees by 7,500. Pretty soon, we'll be able to
move the rest of the federal government over to the Agriculture
Department. (Laughter).

I also signed before I came out here the Government
Management Reform Act -- again, a little notice bill, but it will be
very important to all of you as we seek to keep this process going.
It will help to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse by developing
reliable financial statements on costs and performance. Within four
years, for the first time ever -- believe it or not -- the government
will publish, just like any good company would, an annual
consolidated financial statement covering every Executive Branch
agency. We are going to do that as well.

There's one more step I want to take today, and this may
be somewhat controversial, but it's important. You know, these
signing ceremonies are fun. Everybody forgets there are a lot of
hard work and tough tradeoffs and difficult decisions that leads to
these things.

Congress recently passed two spending bills that prevent
several government agencies from making the personnel cuts that must
be made to continue reinventing government and to finance the crime
bill. Today, I'm asking Congress to get rid of those restrictions on
our ability to cut back big government and to do more with less.
This is a matter of principle, as well as practice. No agency
anywhere should be exempt from doing its job as efficiently as
possible. The federal employees don't want it that way. It's not
fair to some and not others, and it won't permit our system to work
as it should.

Finally, let me say this. Most of you here care a lot
about all this. But a lot of people don't get very excited about it.
And far too many can't imagine that government could every change
itself. But bit by bit, the things we are doing, like the thing we
are doing today, we'll be able to prove, by actions, not words, that
we can use taxpayers money wisely and with respect in an appropriate
way. After all, the American people own this place. They are our
employers, as well as our customers. They deserve the same honesty
and efficiency from their government they demand from the private
sector. They should settle for nothing less. With this historic
law, we are taking another big step in meeting their expectations and
in doing our duty.

To all of you who have made this day possible, I say a
profound thank you.